Similarly to what you feel about ‘keeping yourself upright’, do you have an intuition about ‘finding yourself uprooted’? I mean, surely there are cashed responses to falls, both natural and learnable; and there seem to be many biased responses to mental falls, which can be considered ‘natural’ for the moment. What happens when you are physically falling down, have already noted to yourself that this is totally a mistake, and are minimizing impact?
Your metaphors seem to rely on there being rather rapid targeted feedback, and should be, intuitively, better in situations when there is only one alternative hypothesis, not for ‘searching for them’. When I imagine imagining, wondering, my inner ‘body image’ holds breath, reaches out, on tenterhooks, skin crawling with goosebumps, and most of all—blind. It is, perhaps, a bad mental posture for a rationalist to train, but what I find comforting about it is—I don’t expect to ‘deal with it and be done’ when I do think of some alternative hypothesis.
Once, when we worked on reducing trade in protected plant species, we sometimes misjudged situations and found ourselves outnumbered. It often meant ‘losing’ (we went away, thoroughly shamed, and sellers became bolder), which meant that next time, sellers would be much harder to subdue, but sometimes we could bluff a way to a draw or even ‘a victory’. (So it was a trade-off between ‘don’t start’ and ‘don’t go’:) I don’t know about others, but I would think, in the middle of confrontation, ‘The Law backs me’, and it really helped. This mantra tipped some inner scale, my shoulders went back by themselves, I became actually polite (not that I am usually purposefully rude to strangers), and yes, this is Dark-Artish. I think I could train myself to a mantra of ‘The Math backs me’, and it would tip me towards action in the same way.
Similarly to what you feel about ‘keeping yourself upright’, do you have an intuition about ‘finding yourself uprooted’? I mean, surely there are cashed responses to falls, both natural and learnable; and there seem to be many biased responses to mental falls, which can be considered ‘natural’ for the moment. What happens when you are physically falling down, have already noted to yourself that this is totally a mistake, and are minimizing impact?
Your metaphors seem to rely on there being rather rapid targeted feedback, and should be, intuitively, better in situations when there is only one alternative hypothesis, not for ‘searching for them’. When I imagine imagining, wondering, my inner ‘body image’ holds breath, reaches out, on tenterhooks, skin crawling with goosebumps, and most of all—blind. It is, perhaps, a bad mental posture for a rationalist to train, but what I find comforting about it is—I don’t expect to ‘deal with it and be done’ when I do think of some alternative hypothesis.
Once, when we worked on reducing trade in protected plant species, we sometimes misjudged situations and found ourselves outnumbered. It often meant ‘losing’ (we went away, thoroughly shamed, and sellers became bolder), which meant that next time, sellers would be much harder to subdue, but sometimes we could bluff a way to a draw or even ‘a victory’. (So it was a trade-off between ‘don’t start’ and ‘don’t go’:) I don’t know about others, but I would think, in the middle of confrontation, ‘The Law backs me’, and it really helped. This mantra tipped some inner scale, my shoulders went back by themselves, I became actually polite (not that I am usually purposefully rude to strangers), and yes, this is Dark-Artish. I think I could train myself to a mantra of ‘The Math backs me’, and it would tip me towards action in the same way.
(Epistemic status: rambling by association.)